Parry's Agave

We're enjoying about a month, so far, of a rare and spectacular beauty from our living room window. It never looked like it might hold that kind of promise, all those years when it was just sitting in the corner of the lot across the way under the street light. It was just another low pokey thing, kinda scruffy, totally inert, mediocre dirty blue color in common slender leaves. I never would have thought it had that potential. I may have passed over them in garden centers and turned up my nose at how they would - not! - decorate my lawn.

Considering housing turnover rates down here, with an aggressive rental rate as well as snowbird abandonment for part of the year, I wonder if the current property owner, seen occasionally doing maintenance on the house, even has a clue what's just happened here. Did whoever planted it have a dream of the promise for years to come? Or was it just a random desert hardy plant plunked into the corner to fill a space? These particular plants, after all, live very ordinary lives for 15 to 25 years before they die in a burst of glory.

Earlier this spring this scrubby agave began to change. Out from the center a thick stalk resembling a giant asparagus started to grow. It became noticed when it rose about a foot over the surrounding leaves. It grew taller, then taller still. I watched it approach the level of the bottom of the roof, where it began to branch out from its single stalk, and rose finally to about it's final height of about three feet taller than the peak of that roof. Each branch developed into a kind of a horizontal paddle, and the many of them surrounded that stalk and decreased in size until the very top. It looked like a Christmas tree perched on top of a flagpole.

A red Christmas tree.

It practically glowed from the sides in the rays of sunrise and sunset. At night under the street light, dim as that light is, the crowning top emerged from the black as if it were an indispensable part of the night, a gift to us mere mortals, teasing you to believe it softly luminescent rather than reflecting back something piped from underground. I so wished I had the camera capable of recording it in those light levels.  I had started shooting it in daylight when the stalk first appeared, and still do as it changes.

It does change. Not the stalk, maintaining its original green. But as those "paddles" broadened out, their tops became pebbly-surfaced as red buds grew upwards across their tops. Like the rest of these changes, it started at the bottom branches and moved placidly into the very crown. As the buds grew, the tips became more yellowish, giving a bicolor look to each branch. Each bud opened to let a feathery center emerge above the petal tips, making it truly spectacular.

Now it was really becoming noticed. I'd been crossing the street taking multiple shots for days, attempting to capture each stage, even capturing the swarming tiny insects working to gain whatever pollen or nectar they were seeking. Saguaros are blooming now as well, and my camera captured what I presume are the same little critters. Close as I was, especially on neighborhood saguaros with blooming lower limbs, they never approached me, never stung, never hummed in my ears, never tickled my eyes or tried to fly up my nose. They had a job to do and humans had no part in their world.

With the start of the color change, the top of this flowering stalk was still solid red while the bottom was changing from bicolor to solid yellow. Throughout this stage it became the neighborhood attraction. Cars were stopping, some doing u-turns, and groups of people emerged with their cameras, pointing out parts of the plant to their companions, shooting a photo or three before leaving. The next carfull wasn't far behind.

I fully understand that, cruising the area as I do myself to capture all the various blooms of the season. Never, whether visiting many years ago or living here, even at the Desert Botanical Gardens, have I ever seen this particular agave bloom. I've seen others of this asparagus shape, including one just a couple blocks away, nice enough in ordinary green to ho-hum yellow. But never one of the Parry's red color. While it blooms, it is the most splendid thing around. I'm still shooting it myself.

Others have pretty much stopped coming by, now. Solid yellow has climbed to the very tip, and the bottom is slowly browning, looking old and wasted. The flowers have done their work. Now it's time for seed production, a time when less attention is a good thing. I expect the seeds will be finished sometime in mid summer. They'll likely be big so they will be slow to mature. I hold little hope that the dried up stalk will even be there when we return, much though I'd like to harvest some of the seeds. Someone, perhaps the owner, perhaps a grounds-keeping hired helper, will have decided before then that it's ugly and have chopped it down. They may never even know what beauty was produced on this corner, much less the value of offering seeds for generating more plants that most of us here will never live to see bloom.

But, oh, our yard has some corners....